The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 161 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Evans: Amazon's atomized structure enables indefinite scaling without added hierarchy
“And then everything else sits on top of that and is radically decentralized. So everything is a team. There's a team of, like, three people. So shoes in Germany are three people, and makeup in France is four people. And music players, well, pick a category. It…”
Hastings: Netflix competes for broad leisure time, not just Amazon or HBO
“It's not just competing against Amazon or HBO, it's really this open competition for time.”
Rampell: No horizontal services marketplace exists despite Amazon's efforts
“You don't have any horizontal services marketplace, despite the fact that Amazon is trying to do that.”
Alex Rampell: Apple threatens Amazon with App Store removal over in-app purchases
“And Apple is saying, hey, you want to go buy this streaming video from Amazon? Uh-uh. Can't do it on an Apple phone. The Amazon app will not let you buy certain types of things because otherwise Apple would remove it from the app store.”
Shirky: Xiaomi's operational model resembles Amazon more than Apple
“The company that Xiaomi is most like is Amazon, and when you think about the kinds of things Amazon has done to innovate you see, again, this obsession with supply chain management.”
Overstock launched a partner drop-shipping marketplace years before Amazon
“And thus began our partner program. We were the first to the market with it. Amazon followed a couple years later.”
Markoff: Google acquired robotics startups to build an automated delivery network
“When Andy Rubin was going around the valley and buying and around the world and buying up, you know, the world's best roboticist, he was sketching out a vision which I would describe as a Google competing with Amazon. And you know, and if you can kind of see t…”
Rascoff: Zillow replaced board PowerPoint decks with Amazon-style written memos
“We switched about a year ago to a memo system after Bezos and Amazon's model of kind of no PowerPoint for one or two meetings in a row.”
Jeff Jordan: Amazon and Yahoo's free auctions failed against eBay
“Amazon and Yahoo launch auction businesses early in eBay's life and they went for free. So every seller in the world said, I'll list, list my site there. It didn't work cause they hadn't, they couldn't get the buyers to show up there. So eBay, even though we w…”
Jordan: Amazon's e-commerce growth comes entirely from third-party sellers
“One of the secrets of it, dirty secrets of Amazon is they their first party business isn't growing very fast at all. Their third party business is exploding.”
Jordan: Amazon and eBay each represent 20% of US online spending
“I've done some back of the envelope calculations that Amazon, if you take their first party business and their third party business and normalize it for consumer sales, they represent about one in five dollars spent on the internet. Interestingly, eBay also re…”
Swartz: Smaller startups will increasingly compete with Amazon on service
“The Amazons of the world are going to have a lot of competition from smaller startups on the service front.”
Evans: Investor demand for immediate cash returns would collapse Amazon's stock
“If for some reason investors decided, you know what, we're going to fundamentally change your attitude to what kind of returns we want from this business. We're going to stop thinking about it as a bridge. It needs to start spitting out cash to us right now to…”
Evans: Bezos operates Amazon like a venture fund that never returns capital
“The difference is at some point we have to go back to our LPs and say, well, we're kind of done with that bunch of companies and here's your three or four X return. Right. Whereas Bezos doesn't have to go back to his LPs. People are just willing to let him kee…”
Evans: Amazon Video Is a Loss Leader to Drive E-Commerce Sales
“And if you then turn around and say, well, gee, look, you know, they're spending this much on video content, and they can't possibly be making a profit on that. Well, yeah, they're making a profit by selling you headphones. That's how it works.”
Evans: Amazon isn't losing money; it reinvests past profits into new businesses
“It's not that they lose money on anything they do. It's just that all the profits they take, they put into new things. So they spend business profits from yesterday's business on tomorrow's business.”
Bezos manages Amazon on a 20-year horizon, ignoring quarterly earnings pressure
“Bezos has, he doesn't have a majority, but he has effective control of the company. He's got a large stake in it. He doesn't need to raise money from the stock market. He does need the share price to be stable, or at least not fall, because that's how he pays …”
Bezos reinvests hundreds of billions into Amazon's infrastructure over holding cash
“And for Amazon, you've got exactly the opposite story, that instead of taking, putting a hundred and fifty billion dollars in the bank, he's put a hundred and fifty billion dollars into building new warehouses, and AWS, and new countries, and new categories, a…”
Evans: Assessing Amazon's net income is like summing a VC fund's P&Ls
“To look at the profitability of Amazon, it's a bit like looking at our firm. And saying, okay, well let's add up the P and L of all of the companies that we've invested in. And is it positive or negative? And I don't think that would tell you anything meaningf…”
Evans: Amazon Bundles Digital Content to Lock In Retail Shoppers
“So they throw that into your Prime subscription, they throw as many things as they possibly can that have no marginal cost other than bandwidth, which is not really the issue, into their, into your Prime subscription. As a way of enticing you into taking out a…”
Evans: Narrative that Amazon sells below cost is 'doubly nonsense'
“So this idea that Amazon thrives by selling at below cost is, is doubly nonsense, because half the stuff on Amazon, they don't even set the price, they're not even setting the price for.”
Investing in Instacart violates Jordan's rule against competing with Amazon
“So, so I'm violating one of my hard and fast rules in the sense of card investment, which is don't compete with Amazon.”
Evans: Amazon treats TV content and devices as e-commerce loss leaders
“In the US, that's not really the point at all. You know, it's just Amazon, Amazon video, Netflix video, whatever, get them on the device and get them to buy groceries from us, get them to buy diapers from us, get them to buy headphones from us, and the TV is t…”
Evans: Netflix and Amazon match top US media content budgets
“Netflix and Amazon are now top tier content producers. They have equivalent budgets to the other major US entertainment companies.”
Dixon: Tech power concentration is at its highest since peak Microsoft
“We live in a time where I think we have probably the greatest concentration of power in, on the internet that, that I mean, you know, or in the technology world since probably Microsoft at its peak in the nineties.”
Rampell: Banking faces an Amazon moment as physical branches become anachronistic
“We really think the Amazon moment is coming to banking, and I'll talk a little bit more about why and how, but a lot of it is really, it's predicated or it's related to this idea of the physical location being a little bit more of an anachronism than a buildin…”
Rampell: Amazon's Fire Phone was a smart move against app store fees
“Amazon, they built the Fire Phone. Which ended up being a flop, but it was a very, very smart move for Amazon to do because they realize if I'm Amazon and I want to go sell a book to somebody, I'm not allowed to do that through Apple or through Google unless I…”
Evans: Amazon is the fourth largest clothing retailer in the US
“Today, Amazon is the fourth largest clothes retailer in the USA, not the fourth largest online clothes retailer, the fourth largest clothes retailer.”
Amazon marketplace gross margins reach 80% to 90% compared to 25% retail
“So Amazon's gross margins as a retailer are just around 25%. Their gross margin as a marketplace are 80, 90%.”
Amazon marketplace profits fund aggressive expansion into new initiatives
“We believe that one of the key drivers of profitability in Amazon, and we believe the core businesses at Amazon are very, very profitable. Are the fact that they're layering on this high margin business on top of essentially close to a breakeven first party bu…”
Amazon and Yahoo failed to compete with early eBay auctions
“Both launched auction businesses to compete with eBay early in the day. And both quickly got a lot of supply because they listed it, there were no listing fees. They required no economics. And no consumers went. Both businesses were DOA, and they abandoned it …”
Evans: Combined GAFA revenues remain smaller than TV and advertising
“Even Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon combined there, or GAFA, as the telecoms industry tends to call them add up to less than TV business or advertising and are much, much smaller than mobile or proper, proper industries like cars or clothes.”
Sinofsky: Microsoft worries far more about Amazon and Google than startups
“The only incumbents are only interested in what the other incumbents are doing. Microsoft is worried way more about what Amazon and Google are doing than anyone in a startup space.”
Evans: Big Tech produces more profits than the entire telecoms industry
“You have a pretty safe bet that Google, Meta, Amazon Microsoft, Apple produce more profits than the entire telecoms industry.”
Rampell: AWS accounts for vast majority of Amazon's market cap
“AWS accounts for the vast majority of market cap of Amazon.”
Evans: Amazon excels at order fulfillment but fails at product discovery
“Amazon is great at getting you the SKU, terrible at telling you what SKU you want.”
Ghodsi: Ideal hires combine big-tech scale experience with startup grit
“I love to hire people who have seen great at a big company, like, or I don't know if it's great, but they've seen process scale, big company. They've been at a Google, they've been at Amazon, they understand the processes so that I understand how to navigate a…”
Moore: LLM hallucinations force shoppers back to Google and Amazon
“All, like, all LLMs, but I'll use ChatGPT as the example, because the most people use it have this really unfortunate and annoying problem of hallucinating around product recommendations that basically everyone experienced if you tried to use it for that.”
Rampell: CamelCamelCamel is Amazon's largest affiliate partner
“I think it's actually Amazon's biggest affiliate”
Otto: Cedar uses multi-armed bandit algorithms to personalize billing follow-ups
“So we use these multi-armed bandits, they're called. And then based on how the patient clicks through the app, that gives us another set of data, which is engagement data. And together with this engagement data, then of course the follow-ups are different. I m…”
Ismail: Tech winners like Apple and Google succeeded by becoming platforms
“Yahoo, BlackBerry, Nokia all failed to become platforms, right? Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon all successfully became platforms, and that business model basically carries you through because now you wire yourself into the infrastructure.”
Amazon sellers make virtually zero sales outside the Buy Box, notes Liu
“You basically get no sales if you're not in the buy box.”
Moore: High-end brands refuse Amazon listings but join curated platforms
“On Amazon, there's lots of high-end brands who will say, we'll never put our products on Amazon. But they will put them on Sense or another marketplace that's kind of a more curated list of, like, high-end items.”
Fish: Proof of Replication balances ASIC barriers with commoditized storage access
“So I think that's sort of where, Where proof of replication falls. Somewhere in between something which has high, you know, barriers of entry, such as something which requires ASICs you know, versus something that is just so convenient for Amazon to do and par…”
Fish: Proof of Replication prevents Amazon from easily attacking decentralized networks
“When you do something like proof of replication, it's an extremely inconvenient way of storing files, right? So if Amazon were to convert all of its storage to you know, proof of replication for formatted storage it would be quite inconvenient if not if not co…”
Fish: Governments can easily force centralized cloud providers to censor files
“If you have Amazon in charge of all the storage, then maybe Amazon is not intending to censor Individuals, but say a government is, it's much easier for a government to prevent Amazon from serving files to their country than, you know, a amorphous internet of,…”
Fish: A 1% storage overhead hurts Amazon but empowers individual users
“I mean, when you're talking about a huge business like Amazon where the potential impact of, you know, making a small difference in the latency that they have for their customers or a small overhead in the storage that they're using. It could be, it could real…”
de la Garza: AWS Employee Misconfiguration Caused Hosting Provider Data Breach
“There was a hosting provider that had a breach of their data that was caused by an, it was actually an AWS salesperson, had misconfigured the permissions on their S three bucket and had a bunch of customer confidential data inside this bucket, which then got d…”